Monday, August 31, 2015

Down in the dusty vale the impalers ply their trade - making
upright citizens of those who have broken the law of the sainted dead. Few
trees remain but slender saplings, carefully tended that they may grow tall and
straight the better to correct the wayward.

In that vale the
children of the impalers are taught early that their teeth belong to the oldest
of rats. By his permission are they allowed to erupt from baby gums. By his
permission also the little borrowers are allowed to gnaw such portions as they
find suitably delectable but only for their allotted time. When their time is
up the teeth grow weak and fall out, as it were a sign of the senescence of
their infancy and burgeoning into what passes for adulthood among the impalers.
These adult years, the years between the ages of eight and their inevitable
death by thirty-six from teeth gone rotten and poison in the blood, are held to
have been purchased by the offerings they make of baby teeth and of teeth
stolen from those they execute.

There is among them a trade in teeth chiselled from the
mouths of the impaled and the-yet-to-be-impaled. Favour may be gained from the
children of the eldest that scamper in the walls of the world by the right
offering of the right teeth, though it is argued among them a great deal about
who knows the correct procedures to contact and placate Those Who Gnaw Beyond.
It is said by some that those beyond care not about the status of the one to
whom a particular set of teeth belonged, more than that, it is not known
precisely whether they can know, it is the case that they may be bargained with
as to what manner of circumstance and heritage may be accepted to be embedded
in each handful of teeth. The elders who engage in these bargains rely on a
sophisticated and poetic form of lying that tests skilful rhetoric and
plausibility against an otherworldly cunning;

Those that come in the night from the riddled dark beneath
are appalling, but are dutiful servitors of Him That Gnaws. The ones who have
pleased him smile broad and yellow at the twitching recipients of their
expertise long into their fourth decade, until the inevitable cankerworm that
grows in the ancient jaw claims them in the writhing sweaty death-beds it
bestows.

They are knowns as fellers of wood and all the trees about
are well-hewn to coppicing stumps and dank mud among which bristle spinily
their nameless hamlets. Seven families dwell across a league of valley floor,
the lookalike Skenchbacks, the impertinent Skelpies, the Skenetons as thin as
sneering switches and Skenydougars with thunder in their voices, the grotesque
loping Skerrimudges, the Skoomits of sickly hue and the rampant Skelters
running before all.

There are 4d6 in each of the seven hamlets, of which 1d4
will be amenable to becoming hirelings in exchange for the right to chisel
teeth from fallen and captured foes in addition to normal fees.

All are as Normal Folk without armour but with a clotting
beetle, a tendle knife or a meathook.

Their Laighlander heritage blinds them to the Darkness in the North. From the vale it can be clearly seen that a portion of the sky has fallen. Dread constellations glitter from beyond.

For Skenchbacks
only roll hit points for one, all others are alike

For Skelpies
assume the most antagonistic demeanour as standard

For Skenetons
assume they secretly plot to impale whoever they meet on whatever trumped-up
charges they can imagine.

For Skenydougars
negate all attempts at stealth, they bellow and shriek like boreal tempests

For Skerrimudges
allow a +1 bonus to surprise for they delight in ambuscades

For Skoomits
assume a maximum of one hit point but an active alliance with the Eldest of
Rats

For Skelters
double movement at all times

Forenames and associated traits are determined by a d20 roll

Trasimondo – pestiferous

Ursine – hirsute

Cateline – rancorous

Harrowjack - staring

Jehanne – mouldy

Gormlaith - haughty

Agrippina – skittish

Eleazar – avaricious

Grigori – merciless

Ephrath – lascivious

Ailill - capricious

Ashling – dazed

Corvus – hungry

Benedikt – secretive

Egon – vicious

Antje – unyielding

Ulfberht – watchful

Gerlinde – sly

Hedwig – warlike

Pherick – mumbly

When a favoured impaler dies (1-in-6 is favoured, as are all
Skoomits) a Rattenkönig bursts forth from the earth in a hideous swarming mass
to enact vengeance upon the slayer according to the bargain of the teeth .

Bloody Flux: Save
vs. poison or contract diarrhoea, vomiting, cramps. Save vs. poison each day or
lose a point of constitution. Three consecutive saves indicates recovery.

Benighted as they are and inured to atrocity by their
calling, the impalers have dark prejudices and a predilection for the brutal
imposition of penalties upon those they deem, by the fickle whim of their violent
instincts, outlawed;

D6 determines prejudice of visited family;

1. Any diminutive and rotund
individual with clever feet is obviously a Grummuck o’ Grundlestoan and should
be dragged naked through brambles before being skewered transversely upon an
iron spike

2. Any lankily fey and wanearthly
personage is probably a Neugle from the Wild Black Yonder who covets the tears
of the innocent and should be impaled upright upon a thorny branch and burnt
after death in a furnace.

3. Any stooped and gravelly person
is thought an Ambulant Worm crawled hence from its millennial encystment in the
dark earth’s bowels. For such a thing only the inverse impalement through the
wretched maw will ensure its demise. It is customary to shatter the limbs prior
to the enactment of the sentence.

4. A clever-looking bloke with
cumbrous tomes is in all probability a Dwimmerthane in the service of Uncle
Withershins, who keeps a ledger of the minor iniquities of right-thinking folk
that he may the more effectively tempt them from the road to Neorxnawang. For this crime he should be impaled backward through the lower ribs and pelted with all manner of refuse.

5. A weird woman with pets has in
all probability tempted the Ounkin Wights from the Middle Airs into bestial
form that she may indulge with them in manifold debaucheries. Such a one need
be buried alive with her familiars and pierced with a dozen stakes of rowan
wood.

6. One who moves with practiced poise,
cowled and cloaked and lightly-shod, is of a certainty a Malign Funambulist who
seeks to steal the salvation of sleepers through their nostrils. The punishment
for such is to be gaunched at a rampart upon an iron hook.

Each year comes a hundred captives from the town of Strokannet
in obedience to a law that seeks to suppress the Cormorantine Heresy that died
seven generations since. The quota still exists by the unchangeable law that
thrives among them and subjugates their native will to the performance of meaningless
slaughter in the name of those that are dead. For those of Strokannet and
Routhercocke are subjects of a thanatocracy whose hierarchical positions have
long been held by the dead of seven hundred years gone. The will of the dead manifests
in reality as edicts handed down to be heeded above all, such that the living
aristocracy in those towns have been demoted over the centuries that they are
reigned over now by, respectively; a Seventh-degree Underslave’s Verminhandler
and a Thrice-banished Scullion-hags’s Groom of the Unmentionable Exudate (in
common parlance, they are still referred to as the Handler and the Groom but
the awareness of the ignominy inherent in all in these latter-days is
ever-present, even unto grovellings and prostrations that punctuate
everything). These potentates and all their even more ignominious underlings
are obedient to the tracts their ancestors bestowed upon them but above-all to
that bestowed by the seven chief tracts in all their gnarled poesy and in their
crippling opacity of ancient syntax. These tracts are; The Margrave’s Tract, The
Tutelary Subdeacon’sParadoxes
Reconciled, The Burgrave’sBrief commentary on the Margrave’s Tract,
TheHaberdasher’sAppendices
Re-examined, The Apertures ‘twixt
Gelding Daysby her Grace the
Slattern-Keeper’s Mistress et cetera . Their names are beside the point,
their contents are such that the enunciation of psalms and platitudes from each
will summon forth an obedient citizen of either the Branks of Strokannet or of
the Bulwark at Routhercocke whose willingness to heed the Tract-holder’s
interpretation of the Tract necessitates their servitude in the most
circumstances (Morale is governed by charisma as usual)

Lost tracts are to be found in troves in place of various
grimoires at the GM’s whim. Read aloud from a tract in the Language of the Dead
and after 1d12 days arrives one whose rank is beneath that of ninth-degree
underthrall (Summoned individual is a level 3 henchperson);

2. Morwenna
: A Carpentaria of Routhercocke in jangle-sark, a caged songbird upon her helm
and a billhook (the songbird dies when evil is nigh, the jangle-sark provides
+1 AC but -1 chance to surprise, Billhook d10)

4. Braam: A Lime-kilner from the
Routhercocke Ovens with blood in his spittle and ancient barking-irons
(barking-irons [pistoles] d6 dmg, ROF ½ backfire on a 1 for full dmg, ignore
armour)

5. TristramGoad: A Destrier’s Concubine from the stables at Strokannet with high
helm and horsehair plumes and flail and no mercy in his heart (Flail d8, ML
check to prevent pursuit of fleeing enemies to the very end)

6. AtropaGlandrankle: Imperfect Stranger of the Lost House of Strokannet* in
green battle-smock and bearing a green Morgenstern and a flask of lindwurm bile
that blazes with venomous fire when exposed to air. (AC +1, Morgenstern d10
dmg, Lindwurm Bile: 2d6 per rd. for 1d4 rds + save vs. poison to all within 20’
or swoon from the fumes for 1d4 rds)

Thursday, August 27, 2015

As I see it, there are two main
strands of speculative fiction: that in which there is some degree of pretence
that things certain historical peoples were deluded about were actually true,
and that in which wholly speculative propositions are made that nobody has ever
believed were true. This distinction can usefully be applied to differentiate
science fiction from fantasy but there are obviously differing degrees to which
individual texts are bound by these categories. Fantasy is predominantly a
projection back into a historical-credulity-space in which belief in gods,
magicians, fairies and demons are taken to be truth, whereas sci-fi mines a
futuristic-speculation-space in which the assumed position is that certain
predictions made about the future have come to pass. There is a tendency for fantasy
to be less concerned with working out the possible ramifications of the
fantastic elements than science fiction is with its speculative elements but
that broad generalisation is subject to innumerable specific variations.

It is fantasy that I am most
interested in, and for reasons which may be different than most. In his essay Epic Pooh, Michael Moorcock offers a
criticism of elements of Tolkienesque epic fantasy as inherently conservative
and reactionary, a means of mollycoddling the bourgeoisie with comfortable lies
about the world. While Moorcock was primarily concerned with the political and
social, rather than the ontological, an argument can be made that fantasy
represents a kind of atavistic reality, one in which modern systems of
categorisation are discarded in favour of something altogether more archaic. As
an avowedly sceptical atheist I find the idea of actually believing the things
mediaeval humanity believed to be distasteful, but at the same time find the
fact that they actually did believe them fascinating. Adopting the everything-they-believed-was-true
approach allows me to take the much-maligned role of the cultural coloniser,
patronisingly aping the attitudes of a non-privileged other with an aplomb
granted by the fact that the patronised, culturally-colonised other is largely
extinct. This fact of their extinction also allows me to venture, unmolested by
judgment, into scathing criticism and parody of the abhorrent attitudes mediaeval
people held with regards to women, sexual servitude, torture, violence as
entertainment, racism, abject thraldom to monolithic religion, cruelty to
almost everything and intolerance of everything else. Of course, the
everything-they-believed-was-true approach also falls foul of inherent
contradictions when the heterogeneous nature of real historical cultures and
their beliefs is taken into account. It can’t all be true.

My view of mediaeval people as
predominantly ignorant creates an interesting paradox in terms of my attitude
to the fantasy genre. If fantasy is to be believed, mediaeval people were not
mistaken in their positions with regards to fairies and wizards. A rarely asked
but very interesting question arises. If, in the context of the narrative, they
are right about wizards, what else are they right about? The answer offered by lazy fantasy writers - the least interesting answer - is that the people of the
fantasy world are indistinguishable from modern rational sceptics in Ren Faire costumes. These
people understand their world in much the same way educated westerners of the
late 20th to early 21st century understand it. Their
belief in the existence of magic is supported by empirical observation. They
believe in deities whose powers are demonstrably real. They believe in
supernatural monsters who exist in an ecology alongside conventional creatures
and whose supernatural powers are naturally occurring phenomena. Within this
understanding of the fantasy world superstition is fact and therefore does not
exist. All of which makes their world more rational than the real world. Which
robs it of some of its wonder, to be sure, and also robs it of much of its
perilous strangeness, which simply won’t do.

There are varying levels to which
it is possible to take the apocryphal claims of mediaeval people as fact. I
would argue that the further you allow yourself to travel down the rabbit hole
of the mediaeval paradigm, the weirder the world becomes and the
weirder the people themselves become. In comparison Legolas Greenleaf, say, who
is an immortal scion of a line whose ancestors lived before the first rising of the sun, is less
weird than a mediaeval Englishman who believed that geese grew on trees,
intellectually disabled children are fairy changelings and that burning cats alive is hilarious. The problem remains, and is even compounded, if you grant
all the claims made by mediaeval people as true. Take for granted, for example,
that the claims made in mediaeval bestiaries, wherein the intrusive ubiquity of
religious parable and a general off-the-wall silliness usurps all observational
naturalism, and you have a world in which the camel and the leopard can breed
and that is where giraffes come from, where panthers breathe an intoxicating
sweet fragrance, where mice are spontaneously generated by the soil and many
stranger things are true - the world is almost unrecognisable. There is an
approach that is sometimes taken which is to have a bet each way, to allow that
some of the irrational claims made by historical people are true in the context
of the narrative but disallow others, or relegate them to a shrunken category
of mere superstitions. This feels like compromise.

There was apparently a belief that beavers self-castrated to escape from hunters

One of the aspects of working
within a mediaeval fantasy paradigm that I find as powerful as it is
underutilised is what TV Tropes calls deliberate values dissonance. This is
what is being employed when the writers of Mad Men make Don Draper, obviously a
protagonist and therefore relatable, prone to historically consistent lapses
into chauvinism and insensitivity, which make him more fully realised as a
character, more matriculated into the internally-consistent structure of the milieux.
In much the same way, it would ring false to me to write an urbane roguish
swashbuckler in an Elizabethan London who eschewed the bear garden, had no
scorn for the lower classes nor festering racism in his heart. There is no
reason why ideologies cannot be critiqued without resorting to artificial
constructs. The beauty of described worlds, like the beauty in all of art,
exists independently of moral judgments. The entity to which one writes is a human
first, and it is invariably insulting to that humanity to tell comforting lies
about the nature of the world. This is essentially what Moorcock was driving at
in his essay, though I do disagree with him about Tolkien I concur with the
general thrust: fantasy need not be meek. To my mind, in order that those who people
the world be in some way historically concordant with the beliefs that they
held, beliefs which the author utilises in constructing the reality in which
they are embedded, some degree of estrangement from contemporary morality needs
to be in place. To live in a demon-haunted world is to be haunted by demons.

M. John Harrison, whose work I
have only recently made happy acquaintance with, is renowned for the scorn he
has for world-building. In his essay, Whatit might be like to live in Viriconium, Harrison describes how the role of
the invented world is not to provide a consistently intelligible reality
outside the parameters of the narrative. Of his invented city, Viriconium he
writes; “it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on
offer. Those goods, as in Tolkien or Moorcock, Disney or Kafka, Le Guin or
Wolfe, are ideological”. While he explicitly states that the purpose and
function of invented worlds in gaming contexts is different from those in which
fictional narratives are based I am going to conveniently ignore this fact, or
at least pretend I am writing fiction, and allow some of the constraints to
fall away. It does not matter, in the context of the narrative the structure of
reality can fluctuate according to the needs of the narrative. Acknowledging
the potential for the role of constraints in honing creativity, I can at the
same time reject the constraints when rejection is necessary.
Harrison does this effortlessly, Viriconium fluctuates according to the needs
of the narrative. Whatever is on the bill of goods that needs animating, the
city can be rewritten around those ideas the better to bear them along.

This attitude towards
world-building is liberating. There is a quality to any exhaustively detailed
world that is tiresome and false. No world can possibly be as detailed as Earth
(literally, because all invented worlds are contained within Earth). There are
always ragged boundaries at the end of the author’s endurance where things
referred to are obviously just names with no substance behind them and no more
narrative to make them resonant. Tolkien’s primary criticisms of invented
languages like Volapük and Esperanto is that they had no legends to make them
real. The entire corpus of Middle-Earth writings exist ostensibly so that Tolkien’s
invented languages would feel more alive. I take the approach that because invented
languages are difficult to animate with invented history and difficult also to construct
with any degree of verisimilitude without considerable philological expertise
and painstaking effort, I do not ever use invented words. The words I do use
are very often obsolete dialect terms, and often applied to obscure folkloric
concepts drawn from the well of things benighted people once believed. This
constraint serves a number of purposes; I do not have to construct a language
and the history of that language, I can avail myself of the robust
interconnectedness and developed sound symbolism of existing language to embed
the concept more fully into the world, I can encode extra layers of meaning
into the names, and I can create refugia where otherwise extinct words can
survive, however briefly, and be repurposed. The employment of obsolete obscurities is also part
of a strategy of estrangement wherein I can subvert expectations about familiar
things the better to lead toward the mystery I am trying to reveal.

That there is a persistent
vocabulary that can be used to refer to things nobody still believes in is endlessly
fascinating to me. The things people believed to be true seem to be
epiphenomena deriving from our limited and biased perceptions of the world and
our capacity for confabulation and exaggeration. That nobody ever saw a fairy
is beyond doubt, the fact that people from innumerable cultures independently
held firm convictions that there was an invisible race of others with
potentially malign powers bears powerful testimony to the fact that, as
concepts, as delusions and as components of language, fairies were (are) real.
This list of legendary creatures from a compilation of British folkloric
material known as the Denham Tracts, incidentally a source of speculation about
origin of the word hobbit, testifies to the proliferation of terminology used
to refer to things that never existed;

In spite of my scorn for the
barbarisms committed by historical people I find the things they imagined to be
true fascinating precisely because I am one of them. The archetypes of
mythology exist as archetypes because they fulfil some primordial niche in the
human imagination. It is for this reason that they persist. I am in the habit
of engaging in recreational reductionism in a lot of contexts and I am especially
fond of mocking humanity in its hubris. I think there is a perspective from
which we can view the latent human need to confabulate that is simultaneously
humbling and ennobling, and one that need not resort to magical thinking. Human
beings are composed of matter and energy, we are not merely embedded within cosmology,
we are ourselves components of cosmological processes and part of the universe-in-motion.
The mythic archetypes that so easily delude human beings are as much the product
of naturalistic processes as anything else and it is precisely because they are
part of the naturalistic process that they have such traction. They are
ancient, primordial relics of our animal heritage. Magicians, fairies, monsters and otherworlds seem to lurk in the
essential structure of our shared humanity. If they did not exist it would be
necessary to invent them.

So when I think of the things I
like to write about - the bill of goods – I keep returning to the same things; the nature of the world as imagined by the ignorant, how this crudely imagined
representation of things can be described in a consistent way and whether there is
any value in consistency, how there is a necessity to reserve some moral
judgment with regards to those that people the narrative and even to embrace their immorality as a form of integrity, how everything seems
to be extruded by the idiotic machinery of spacetime. For all these things I
keep returning to fantasy. It would be interesting to imagine a future world
that based a genre upon the delusions contemporary humanity holds, a kind of
pseudoscience fiction, complete with messianically-empowered reptoid televangelists and
anti-vax sasquatch CIA-insiders flying planes into buildings to foil Illuminati
plans to control humanity with chemtrails. Discovering M. John Harrison has
assisted me in debunking some of my own delusions: the Laighlands (Lowlands,
Lawlands, Meagrish Realm) is not a place (it is actually Doggerland) and exists
only as a means to convey ideas and emotional impressions into the brains of
other primates. That is plenty.

I leave you with Ruskin, from Seven Lamps of Architecture,

...the Power of architecture
may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or
intenseness) of its shadow; and it seems to me, that the reality of its works,
and the use and influence they have in the daily life of men (as opposed to
those works of art with which we have nothing to do but in times of rest or of
pleasure) require of it that it should express a kind of human sympathy, by a
measure of darkness as great as there is in human life: and that as the great
poem and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses
of shade, and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric
sprightliness, but must be serious often, and sometimes melancholy, else they
do not express the truth of this wild world of ours; so there must be, in this
magnificently human art of architecture, some equivalent expression for the
trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery: and this it can only
give by depth or diffusion of gloom, by the frown upon its front, and the
shadow of its recess.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

So I spend time writing one thing and then go off and write
another that seems like it is a different thing until I realise that the roots
of both of the things are somehow intertwined. I realise that I still
have a paracosm and it has grown out of the same mind as the one that has always been there. In
this sense, as was the case with Eddison and Tolkien and many others, one’s juvenilia can be utilised as the historical backdrop against
which one’s mature work can be seen. [Insert obligatory disavowal of hubristic
comparisons here]. The personal rewards of
publishing the things I have written are insufficient for me to pursue just yet
and the personal reward of pursuing the great interconnected thing beckons enticingly.

Writing is something I only ever
pretended to be interested in in much the same way as everyone vaguely literate
tends to express a desire to write at some point in their lives. But for much
of the time I spent writing I dabbled fecklessly and was generally shambolic in
my irregularity. Now I am trying to dig my way out of a creative stalemate I am
finding that writing might be a useful neurological exercise and not just as a
self-reflexive practice but also as a means of sharpening the wits.

The way I figure it, when anyone
conceives an artwork of any description they start with an idea that manifests
as a series of emotional impressions. For me it is like a
dumb, pre-verbal looming-out-of-chaos of mingled glory and sadness and bitter
irony and deadpan hilarity and the process of trying to capture
it is always always crude. The enunciation of the idea changes the
idea. For me, writing seems like amateur carpentry, whatever
unspeakably wonderful thing glimmers at the edge of consciousness, its
representation is splintery and rickety and has too many nails.

Over time the translation into
carpentry grows less rickety.

'I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief
moments when you can write.'

Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

Also, while I am throwing in
quotes, this is Thomas Pynchon from Mason and Dixon describing something
vaguely familiar;

“The Astronomers have a game
call’d “Sumatra” the the Rev­d ­often sees them at
together,- as children, sometimes, are
seen to console themselves when something is denied them, - their Board a sort
of spoken Map of the Island they have
been kept from and will never see. “Taking a run in to Bencoolen, anything we
need?” “Thought I’d nip up the coast to Mokko Mokko or Padang, see what’s
a-stir.” “Nutmeg harvest is upon us, I can smell it!” Ev’ry woman in “Sumatra”
is comely and willing, though not without attendant Inconvenience, Dixon’s
almost instantly developing wills and Preferences of their own despite his best
efforts to keep them uncomplicated, - whereas the only women Mason can imagine at
all are but different fair copies of the same serene Beauty,- Rebekah,
forbidden as Sumatra to him, held in Detention, as he is upon Earth, until his
Release, and their Reunion. So they pass, Mason’s women and Dixon’s with more
in common than either Astronomer will ever find out about, for even phantasms
may enjoy private lives, - shadowy, whispering, veil’d to be unveil’d, ever
safe from the Insults of Time.”

Unburdening myself from the need to make things intelligible
to the reality of the game is liberating. Conversely, the realisation that the
purple prose is of less use than the poetic resonance of the concept is
grounding.

Some Quasimortals:

It is possible to become so lost that the home you return to
is no longer home. When a magician starts to transcend mortality they realise
that the self they were was rooted in that mortality and that the
transformation they seek makes a mockery of all the reasons they seek it. The enunciation
of the idea changes the idea. Loss is the price of gain.

1. Cornbrash Stratum, erstwhile pupil of Ravelhain the Garganaut,
opted, in his quest for immortality, for a kind of irresistible physicality that
would daunt time’s vicissitudes with unyielding material toughness. Replacing,
over the course of several decades, all that in him was frail with heavier
elements he became the embodiment of fortitude, a ferrous thing that wades
thighbone-deep through the world and sees through the things he once loved like
vapour.

His peculiar obsession is the structure of things, as he
replaced all that was within him of whim and passion with structural components
devised in such a manner as to stave off decay. He communicates now with
humanity only through architectural manipulations of masses of stone.
Unable to recognise individual human beings he nonetheless can perceive in architectural
style as it shifts from age to age the presence of some kind of agency that is
the aggregate of thousands of minds. It is with this aggregate that he now
seeks to communicate, at intervals of three or four generations, by enacting
reconfigurations of the geometries of their communiques or producing
constructions that parody the degradation of abstract mathematical ideals
manifest in human structures.

2. Glowbason Kale, the cauldron witch, is attended by her
Savoury Characters and by the delectable fragrance of roasted meat. The attendants
number seven to ten, range from medium rare to blackening bones and bear her
along upon a palanquin brazier trailed by a turnspit dog who gnaws at their
ankles and laps at the juices they leave. The witch herself has boiled away for
seven hundred years and languishes in her simmering bath of broth. They travel
in search of firewood from the Hundred of Onbethankit long abandoned where her
toothsome crew have chopped down the spinneys and dug all the peat to keep the fire
burning. She requires, for the recipe that ensures her continuity, certain
herbs - by moonlight plucked from unhallowed ground - and spices from the far
lands.

Her Savouries are variously glazed or garnished or stuffed
with writhing young. All are tasty save those who are now, sadly, overcooked.

3. Behold Auld Jack Smelt on his pitchfork, riding backwards
through dreams. He can live there, in his phantasmagorical Clud-Haas above
Galligantus Peak, somewhat outside a reality he rejects. Upon seeing the
exhilarating wildness of his ride through the sky-wrack, one half-expects him to cackle madly, as mad cackling seems so obviously his
domain. He does not cackle but weeps, or remains stony-faced and dark of countenance.
Sorrows fly with him like hoodie-crows, in his Magonian house they besmirch the
golden-whiteness with their purpureal sootiness and incessant dirge. They roost
above his empty bed and bespatter all that place with the stinking memory of
times before all was lost.

Aspics adorn his gate and writhe upon every floor in poisonous
relief. They remind him of the time it happened and of the time before.

4. Manigate Querken: prenticed to Ysgithrog the
Metempsychotic in an early saeculum, Querken sought and found a conduit into
his own past that he might relive his lost youth over and over. Many times now
he has crawled through the Tunnel in the Ivy to capture and murder the precursory
self as it skulked under a bridge one day in its fourteenth summer. Querken
reinhabits the youth’s life with his sinister foreknowledge and meticulous record
of the trammelled paths of his cyclical reality. He bears with him a grimoire
of exploitable occurrences and passes through the world each new time with more
cunning means of advancing his position and status to enigmatic purposes.

The position of the Tunnel in the Ivy he keeps secret or fortifies
with walls of stone and soldiers bought with extraordinary wealth plundered
from those thralls of conventional causality and sequence who have the
misfortune of falling his prey.

Nobody sees him coming. Nobody knows how many times he has
passed backward through the decades or lived forth again along his timeline, his
head full of foresight and cunning schemes. He may be the oldest of all.

With him Hobshanks, Querken’s man, formerly a Drungary of
the Twelth Assize, now loyal to the death to the master. In which former life Hobshanks
was Sir Layloc Theophagus, his current sobriquet arose from his habit of
falling to his armoured knees in the presence of the master. He is huge and
scarred and his purple cloak is ragged. None may stand before him.

5. The Bearer of Ill-Tidings: In her maidenhood she had
fallen victim to catastrophic sorrow and had thrown herself into a chasm. She
did not die, her broken body hung pinioned in a thorn tree for six days and
nights. On the fifth day a gastrel came and plucked out her eyes. In the
darkness of the seventh dawn the Thicketty Man came (whose cowardly habit was ever
to avail himself of untoward occurrence) and planted in her a seed of the
world’s destruction. It grew in her, this seed, and she grew strong again and
stronger still. Now she walks in the world again a witch unbridled, tall as a
tree, gaunt and hollow and swollen with century-child burgeoning inside. When
she speaks no words come but knives instead, clattering at her feet, etched
with glyphs that speak of ruin.

Mostly she dwells beyond the sky in a star of serrated black
iron that hangs in the utmost void. Upon the earth she casts a tripartite
shadow that tells of forgotten suns, invisible to man. By their light she sees.

6. The Get of Ravelhain: A feral thing, sudden and brutal,
furnished with immeasurable potence, squats in the hideous twilight. Its essence
is a blazing blackness: furred, simian, and eloquent in all the languages of
violence. Upon a long chain an angel of bronze, rearing magnificent in gleaming
counterpoint to the black one. The angel is crowned with lightning and sorrow.
She is immortal and captive to a thing born of the wicked earth.

He wields her like a flail. She keens her celestial lament
for the wickedness of man and he batters mighty citadels to dust and splinters
and drags her from world to world in search of empires to trample and cow.